From a vast land of scattered tribesmen, a great Princedom was born.
In our last episode, the proud tribes of the Eastern Slavs from Ladoga to Kiev were unified
under the Norse Chieftain Rurik and his brother-in-law Oleg.
In this episode, we will continue where we left off, telling the story of war, trade,
politics and adventure that define the history of the early Kievan Rus.
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The early Kievan Rus was in function a tributary Empire, comprised of internally autonomous
tribes and towns, all under the suzerainty of the Grand Prince of the Rurikid dynasty,
who was based in the prosperous trading city of Kiev.
Each tribe within was ruled independently, paying a tribute to Kiev, and joined their
armies to the Grand Prince in times of war.
The tribes received protection from the Grand Prince’s druzhina, an elite retinue of warriors
who kept order across the realm.
Culturally, the Early Kievan state was an ethnic and linguistic smorgasbord.
The Rurikid Princes and their druzhina were most likely predominantly Scandinavian, although
a skilled warrior from any origin could join the Princes’ retinue.
The majority of peoples in Rus lands were the Eastern Slavs, who spoke Old East Slavic
language, from which modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian stem.
Other peoples in the Kievan Rus included the Finno-Ugric and Baltic speaking tribes in
the North, and likely some Turkic peoples from former Khazaria.
Religion across the realm was a diverse spectrum: The Pagan Slavs continued to worship Perun
and Volos in their oaken groves, while the Scandinavian elites retained aspects of their
own pantheons of Thor, Odin and Loki.
One of the most famous living accounts of Norse religious rites comes from the Arab
traveller Ibn Fadlan, whose journey up the Volga River in 922 brought him into an encounter
with a boisterous tribe of Varangian Norsemen.
Fadlan watched in fascination and horror as the body of a great Viking chieftain was laid
in his longship alongside a slave girl, who had volunteered to be ritually sacrificed.
The boat and all the precious personal belongings it carried were thus set alight in a great
bonfire, and the souls within committed to Valhalla.
This funerary practice was probably unique to the Kievan Vikings, and deviated from the
Scandinavian rites.
However, it is a testament that some form of Norse paganism thrived among the warrior-caste
of the Kievan realm.
The Rurikid Princes remained fiercely warlike throughout most of their early history, seeking
to become rich through plunder and tribute.
To them, the ultimate prize would always be the most splendorous land on the far end of
the Black Sea.
To that end, they turned the dragonhead prows of their longboats towards Constantinople,
the place they simply called “The Great City” - Miklagard.
Norse raiders had failed to take Constantinople in 860, but now they were unified under the
Rurikids, they could muster a larger and more organized invasion force.
The first Rurikid expedition against the Great City is recorded in Nestor’s Primary Chronicle.
It occurred in 907AD, when the first Grand Prince of Kiev, Oleg, led a fleet of 2,000
boats ferrying Norse, Slavic, Finnic and Baltic warriors down the Black Sea and into the Bosphorus
strait.
Upon seeing their arrival, Emperor Leo VI closed their harbour of Constantinople and
shut the gates.
Unable to breach the Theodosian walls, Oleg had his men beach their ships and disembark
on the Galatan side of the Golden Horn, ordering his warriors to sack the suburbs and villages
on the peripheries of the Imperial city.
The Rus quickly quashed any resistance, killing many Greeks, looting and burning churches
in the process.
This eventually brought the Romans to submission and forced them to pay a hefty tribute.
Additionally, the Rus had won trading concessions with the Roman Emperor, which boded well for
the long term economic prosperity of the Kievan realm.
It is notable that the Rus ambassadors, who bore Scandinavian names such as Farulf, Hrollaf,
and Stemir, swore to uphold this agreement by swearing upon the Slavic Gods, which suggests
that Slavic and Norse customs had already begun to blend.
Oleg died in 912, succeeded by Igor, the son of Rurik himself.
The Young Prince was met with adversity at the very beginning of his reign.
Troublesome Slavic Drevlians, refused to pay him tribute.
Igor, however, possessed the iron will of his Rurikid bloodline, and was able to crush
them in battle, imposing a harsher annual tribute upon them.
Having proven himself, Igor kept the peace in his realm for a time.
Like his predecessors before him, he began to dream about the Byzantine wealth.
In 941, the Kievan Prince mustered a small fleet of Norsemen, Slavic warriors and Turkic
Pecheneg Mercenaries, sailing up the Dnieper river with the aim of pillaging Byzantine
lands.
This time, however, the Greeks were ready.
Warned by the Danubian Bulgars that the Igor was coming, they dispatched a fleet to halt
their advance.
They utterly destroyed the Norse Longboats using their secret weapon the Greek Fire.
Igor managed to escape the inferno, landing on the northern coast of Anatolia, where he
and the remnant of his army began pillaging the hinterlands, until they were driven back
northwards by the famed Roman generals Bardas Phokas and John Kourkuoas.
Igor returned home and began mustering a far larger army than before, made up of the combined
tribes of the Rus, and by 944 was ready to attack the Imperial city.
Hearing of the imminent arrival of this armada, Emperor Romanos I capitulated, giving up yet
more precious gifts in tribute, while offering more concessions to Rus merchants.
It should be noted that both Rus-Byzantine treaties are full of very specific trading
stipulations, tariffs and customs laws.
This emphasizes that the Rus Princes were also merchants at heart.
However, the Prince’s druzhina had long been dissatisfied with their pay, and beseeched
Igor to take more wealth from his subjects, saying: “Come with us, prince, to collect
tribute, and you will gain and so will we!”
Igor agreed, and to that end, rode to the land of his least favourite subjects, the
ever troublesome Drevlians.
The Grand Prince had already collected tribute from the Drevlians once that year already,
and his return for more made evident that the Drevlians had had enough of Rurikid tyranny.
They poured out of their city, killed the Princes’ retinue and took him captive.
Igor was then executed in a gruesome fashion.
The Kievan Princes’ unceremonious death would lead to the rise of his widow - Princess
Olga.
Despite being around 25 years old, Olga had a Varangian spirit, iron-willed and cunning
as a fox.
Her revenge, recorded in the Primary Chronicle, has since become the stuff of legend.
The Drevlians now had their own designs on the Kievan throne, emboldened by their murder
of the Grand Prince, they sent envoys to Kiev, with a proposal to Olga: We slew your husband
because he plundered us like a wolf.
Our Princes are good and have preserved the land of the Drevlians.
So we come to you, requesting you to marry our prince Mal”.
The Princess knew that marrying the Drevlian prince wasn’t an option, firstly because
he would surely murder her infant son Sviatoslav, and secondly because the vengeance burned
in her heart.
Nevertheless, playing the role of the timid maiden, she feigned eagerness to accept the
offer.
The next day, she had the Drevlian emissaries carried to her Palace in their boat under
the guise of honouring them, only to have the boat thrown into a ditch, and the emissaries
buried alive.
Olga followed up this ruthless deception with another, sending a messenger to Drevlians,
she claimed she would happily marry their Prince Mal, if only they would send her an
honour guard of their best soldiers, so she could be escorted in a manner befitting a
princess.
A contingent of elite warriors were sent to Kiev and once more, Olga welcomed them with
feigned hospitality, allowing them the honour of using her own bathhouse.
When the honour guard entered the sauna to wash, Olga had the doors barred and the building
set aflame.
Olga then travelled to Drevlian lands with a small retinue of loyal warriors.
Upon arrival, she managed to convince the Drevlians that their emissaries and honour
guard were on their way and were not not in fact dead.
A great feast was held in her honour.
As the sun set and the crowd grew drunk with mead, Olga gave her cue and her warriors massacred
over 5,000 Drevlian.
Soon, Olga returned with a massive army to finish the job, town after town in Drevlian
lands fell, until she reached their capital in Korosten.
Knowing that cunning, not brute strength, was the key into the city, Olga offered an
olive branch of mercy:“At this time you have neither honey nor furs, so I have a small
request to make.
Give me three pigeons and three sparrows from each household.
I do not wish to lay a heavy tribute on you as my husband did.”
The people of Korosten were overjoyed and eagerly fulfilled the Princess’ will.
Unfortunately for them, the fires of Olgas’ vengeance had not dimmed.
She had her soldiers attach to each bird a small piece of sulfur wrapped in cloth and
tied to a fuse.
When night fell, she ordered the fuses to be lit, and the birds to be set free.
Flying back over Korosten with their tailfeathers alight, the sparrows and pigeons set the entire
town aflame.
Panicked and broken, the people of Korosten fled their city, only to be captured beyond
the walls by Olgas’ soldiers, slaughtered or enslaved.
Princess Olga proved to be more than just a mass murderer.
For many years after her annihilation of the Drevlians she proved to be an effective, well
respected head of state, ruling the Kievan Rus as regent on behalf of her young son Sviatoslav.
She proactively built settlements in the northern regions of her realm, while ending the ever-hated
tribute system, replacing it with a better regulated system of taxation.
An adept diplomat, she cultivated good relations with trading partners, the most important
of all being Eastern Rome.
In the year 957, she sent off for Constantinople on a diplomatic mission to treat with Emperor
Constantine VII.
There, she accepted the Christian Orthodox faith and was baptised.
We don’t know what Olgas’ motivation was, but it probably was done for political and
economic gain.
She made a piecemeal attempt to encourage Christianity in her realm, having churches
built throughout her realm, but her subjects largely clung to their polytheistic faiths.
Whatever gains Christianity made were further rolled back in 964, when Olgas’ regency
ended, and the young firebrand Prince Sviatoslav took the Kievan throne.
In mannerism and dress, Sviatoslav resembled more his Slavic and Turkic subjects than his
Scandinavian ancestors, the legacy of a hundred years of Norse assimilation into the culture
of their subjects.
By all accounts, Sviatoslav’s violent childhood had made him cold and ruthless . He rejected
his mother’s faith, believing that converting to Christianity would lose him the respect
of the pagan warriors he rode with, and remained devout to the Slavic pantheon.
Sviatoslavs’ reign would be defined by constant, unending conquests.
While his mother continued to run the realm’s bureaucratic matters, the young Prince spent
his days riding with his loyal Druzhina, raiding and pillaging neighbouring nations.
Sviatoslav and his warriors travelled without tents, wagons or kettles.
They lived rough off the land, taking what they needed to survive by right of pillage,
or by hunting wild game.
In popular legend, he was compared to a snow leopard, for he moved lightly, and struck
quickly.
The Young Prince’s first target of major conquest was the land of the Jewish Turkic
Lords.
He and his warriors fanned out over the Eurasian steppe, town by town, tribe by tribe, forcing
the peoples of Khazaria submit themselves to the rule of the Rus, or be annihilated.
Sviatoslav employed Turkic mercenaries from other tribes using their mastery of mounted
combat to counter the equally skilled Khazar horse archers.
In 965, Rus warriors stormed and annihilated the incredibly prosperous trading cities of
Sarkel and Kirch.
This was functionally the end of the Khazars, crippled beyond repair, and their Empire would
never recover.
The final death blow came in 969, when their capital at Atil was destroyed.
A year prior to this, Eastern Roman envoys had approached the Rus Prince with an offer.
In return for a hefty tribute of 15,000 pounds of Gold, Sviatoslav was asked to participate
in a joint invasion of the enemy of the Romans, the mighty Danubian Bulgars.
Seeing an opportunity for wealth, war and glory, Sviatoslav eagerly accepted the Roman
tribute and mustered a 60,000 strong army of Norsemen, Slavs, and Pecheneg mercenaries.
Like his ancestors, he struck like a lightning bolt from heaven, annihilating the armies
of Bulgar Khan Boris II, and quickly conquering the entirety of Northern Bulgaria.
Emperor John Tzimiskes now realized he’d made a deal with the devil.
Sviatoslav was becoming far too powerful, and his marauding army would likely not stop
in Bulgaria, but could pillage its way to the very gates of Constantinople itself.
Knowing that Kiev was largely undefended, the Romans bribed the Pechenegs to betray
Sviatoslav and lay siege to the city.
The Pechenegs proved unscrupulous in the face of Roman gold, and promptly thundered into
the Kievan heartland, laying siege to the Rurikid capital.
Now an elderly woman, Olga was nonetheless able to lead her men and hold out against
the Turkic horde until Sviatoslav could return with his army, driving the Pechenegs back
to their steppe homeland.
Olga died of illness soon after the siege, and was buried quietly on consecrated ground
as Christian tradition demanded.
In death, she was canonised as St. Olga, with the epithet: “equal to the Apostles”.
To this day, she is revered by the Orthodox Church.
Meanwhile, the Romans, not content with poking the bear only once, demanded that all territory
won by the Rus in Bulgaria had to be surrendered to the Emperor in Constantinople, as Sviatoslav
had invaded Bulgaria on their behalf.
Sviatoslav refused and launched an invasion of Byzantium with a massive army of Norsemen,
Slavs, Magyars, and contingents of loyal Pechenegs and Bulgars.
The Rus coalition smashed against the gates of Adrianople, but were defeated by a Roman
counteroffensive at the battle of Arcadiopolis in 970.
The Rurikid Prince was forced to retreat to Dorostolon, where he held out against the
Romans for 65 days, but cut off and surrounded, was eventually forced to make peace with them,
relinquishing his conquests.
Fearing that the truce with Sviatoslav would not endure, the Byzantine emperor induced
the Pecheneg Khan, Kurya, to kill the Rus Prince before he reached Kiev.
Sure enough, while attempting to cross the cataphracts on the isle of Khortitsa, he and
his retinue were beset upon by a hail of Turkic arrows.
Sviatoslav was killed in the ambush, and according to legend, his skull was turned into a drinking
vessel for the Pecheneg Khan.
After Olgas’ passing, Sviatoslav had left the civil governance of the Kievan Rus to
his two sons, Yaropolk and Oleg.
With his death, civil strife now threatened to tear the realm apart as the two sons pointed
their blades at one another, each seeking to ascend as the new Grand Prince.
It is on this cliffhanger that we will end this episode.
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